Weegee Show Featured in the New Yorker

03/10/2017

This show of several dozen images by Arthur (Weegee) Fellig, most of them from the nineteen-forties, includes some film-noir-style wonders: a murder victim, face down in blood on the sidewalk; an aerial view of a electrocuted man lying in a rail yard. An image of enthralled schoolchildren is dryly titled, with seen-it-all humor, “Their First Murder.” But there are tender pictures, too, including one of zookeepers asleep on bare mattresses, under the watchful eyes of giraffes in a pen. It becomes clear that Weegee’s crowd-pleasing prowess derived from his own glee in observing the crowd, as seen in a grid of nine diverse but uniformly rapt onlookers, their eyes all trained on a fire.